“ON Tuesday, September 20th (1803), the day of the execution of Robert Emmet, he was visited at ten o’clock in the morning, by Mr. Leonard McNally, the barrister, who, on entering the room where Emmet had the indulgence of remaining all that morning in the company of the Rev. Dr. Gamble, the ordinary of Newgate, found him reading the litany of the service of the Church of England. Permission was given to him to retire with McNally into an adjoining room, and on entering it, his first enquiry was after his mother, whose health had been in a declining state, and had wholly broken down under the recent afflictions which had fallen on her. McNally, hesitating to answer the enquiry, Robert Emmet repeated the question, ‘How is my mother?’ McNally, without replying directly, said, ‘I know, Robert, you would like to see your mother.’ The answer was, ‘Oh! what would I not give to see her?’ McNally, pointing upwards, said, ‘Then, Robert, you will see her this day!’ and then gave him an account of his mother’s death, which had taken place some days previously. Emmet made no reply; he stood motionless and silent for some moments, and said, ‘It is better so.’ He was evidently struggling hard with his feelings, and endeavouring to suppress them. He made no further allusion to the subject but by expressing ‘a confident hope that he and his mother would meet in heaven.’”[3] Footnote 3: Madden, _op. cit._ p. 461. Madden’s account of this touching incident was furnished him by John Patten, brother of Mrs. Thos. Addis Emmet, and the devoted friend of the whole Emmet family, who was a prisoner in Kilmainham at the time of Robert Emmet’s trial and execution. I have known one woman who, having been able to read, with dry eyes, the melting tale of Sarah Curran’s “Broken Heart,” and to listen, without a sob, to the voice of Sarah’s young lover, so soon to be stilled for ever, pleading from the brink of “the cold and silent grave,” for the last charity of the world’s silence, broke into a passion of weeping as the tragedy, which was Robert Emmet’s life-story, swept through every stage of gathering pathos to the almost intolerable poignancy of its climax—the picture, conjured up by Madden, of the mother who lay dead, of a broken heart, in her widowed home in Donnybrook, while her last-born son, her Benjamin, stood in the dock in Green Street on trial for his life.